sign in sign up
<<
Home , Comic novel, Toni Servillo

67. TAORMINA FILM FEST – FUORI CONCORSO

INDIGO FILM and RAI CINEMA present

Directed by CLAUDIO CUPELLINI with LEON DE LA VALLÉE PAOLO PIEROBON, MARIA ROVERAN, FABRIZIO FERRACANE, MAURIZIO DONADONI, FRANCO RAVERA with and VALERIA GOLINO

inspired on the graphic by Gipi published by Coconino Press – Fandango

An – France coproduction produced by INDIGO FILM with RAI CINEMA in coproduction with WY PRODUCTIONS

CREW

Director CLAUDIO CUPELLINI

Story and FILIPPO GRAVINO GUIDO IUCULANO CLAUDIO CUPELLINI

inspired on the by Gipi published by Coconino Press – Fandango

Cinematography GERGELY POHARNOK

Editing GIUSEPPE TREPICCIONE

Original score MOTTA

Art Director DANIELE FRABETTI

Costume MARIANO TUFANO

sound ANGELO BONANNI

Director assistant CLARA ZULIANI

Casting DAVIDE ZUROLO U.I.C.D.

producers NICOLA GIULIANO FRANCESCA CIMA CARLOTTA CALORI VIOLA PRESTIERI

Co-producer WASSIM BÉJI

Produced by INDIGO FILM RAI CINEMA

In collaboration with WY PRODUCTIONS

International Sales TRUE COLOURS

CAST

LEON DE LA VALLÉE The Son

PAOLO PIEROBON The Father

MARIA ROVERAN Maria

FABRIZIO FERRACANE Aringo

MAURIZIO DONADONI Lorenzo

FRANCO RAVERA Matteo

ALESSANDRO TEDESCHI The Boss

With

VALERIO MASTANDREA The Hangman

and

VALERIA GOLINO The Witch

Synopsis

SHORT

The end of civilization has arrived. It is not known what caused this cataclysm, but the apoca- lypse has wiped out a large part of humanity and the earth has stopped bearing fruit.

A Father and his Son are among the few survivors. The Son grows up like a wild beast, as the Father teaches this is the only way to survive. When the Father dies, the Son decides to under- take a journey along a mysterious river in a hostile world, moved by the desire to discover what was forbidden to him, but above all in search of someone who can read to him the words writ- ten by The Father in the journal he kept for all his life.

LONG

The end of civilization has arrived. The apocalypse has wiped out a large part of humanity and the earth has stopped bearing fruit. It is not known what caused this cataclysm, whether it was a nuclear holocaust, a devastating war or a virus that wiped out so much life on our planet. A Father and his Son are among the few survivors. The Son grows up like a wild beast, because the Father thinks this is the only way he can help his child survive in a world where human relationships have become extremely dangerous. When the Father dies, the

Son decides to undertake a journey beyond the confines of the sluice and the reservoir, along a mysterious river, moved by the desire to discover the world that was forbidden to him, but above all in search of someone who can read the words written by The Father in a notebook. The Son’s journey will turn into a coming-of-age story, where beauty and wonder have to fight against the darkness of a world which seems implacably hostile.

Director’s Notes

THE IDEA

La Terra dei Figli is a graphic novel by Gipi, an artist I have loved and followed for many years, and has become a movie I shot near the Venice lagoon.

I have always considered his work as something emotionally close to my sensibility, but I never thought about adapting one of his works. I have always felt a closeness to his work: I myself wrote and shot a movie that, under the mimetic guise of the noir genre, told of the eternal between fathers and sons. This so dear to me has reappeared in the tables of this story, which I read for the first time three years ago. La terra dei figli is unquestionably a coming-of-age novel, but is also a great tale of ad- venture, vast and exciting, rooted in a literary tradition that starts from Mark Twain - with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer - and reaches the present day in such as Cormack Mc Carthy's The Road.

THE STORY

This story speaks to us about the present in a plastic and very punctual way: it shows us of the world we’re destroying and that we’ll hand over to our own children, it warns us of the tragedy that already looms not too silently over our future. At the same time, both the pages of the comic book and the imag- es of my movie contain another very important warning, which concerns our progressive cultural and human drought. With that in mind, I interpreted the Father's notebook as a precious flame of sorts, which the Son - even if unconsciously – doesn’t want to go out. Knowledge, love and the struggle to stay human are the founding elements of this film. To me, The Son is the synthesis of humanity to which we’ll entrust the future, my whole story revolves around his experiences and his exploits.

LOCATIONS AND LIGHT

The world we delve into in La Terra Dei Figli is told as if the whole civilization that surrounds us has been swept clean. I chose to shoot the film on the Po Delta and in the lagoon around Chioggia because I was looking for a landscape that was alive, brutal and relentless. The film, which is also the story of a journey, takes place along swamps and rivers, between reeds and stilt houses. Yesterday's (today’s) uni- verse is practically non-existent and is represented only in the form of some scattered human skeletons and the archeology of an industrial age that did not survive. The Po river and its delta present all these virtues: right from the first inspections we understood that our arena would be the one overlooking the Adriatic Sea. Light also plays a fundamental role and is interpreted in a modern and visually powerful way: the sky always had to be threatening, the air convey sickness and the colors of nature had to be those of a black . The light of the sun, feeble and precious, embraces our only at the end of the story.

PHOTOGRAPHY

The images in the film are the result of a difficult and radical work. In telling the story of a world with no more electricity, we delegated the task of illuminating nocturnal environments to oil lamps and can- dles. We started from a highly realistic fact and, at the same time, we successfully tried not to flatten ourselves against a development that was documentaristic and bare. Coherently with the story, the visu- al world of the film is raw and violent, the colors support the fragility of the light that we found in the Po river Delta. Like in the films previously made together with the director of photography Gergely Po- harnok, the camera always elects to follow, caress and live with the in every moment of the story.

MUSIC

I chose to avail myself of the collaboration of Francesco Motta because I have known his work for some time. Motta has his own independent and fruitful career within the songwriting dimension, but he has also followed his own personal path in music for film. I had listened to some music he composed for documentaries and a feature film, and I immediately admired his ability to read and interpret the story with passion and emotion, and his disarming ease in translating everything into music. His compositions are born from a rigorous and passionate work, where the cello becomes the protagonist in almost all of the pieces.

COSTUMES

All the elements of the story participate in the reconstruction of a credible, realistic and raw future. The very clothes of our characters are themselves testimony of a world that seems to have lost almost all of its resources. The future we show is something strictly connected to regression, decay, and ruin. Yet grace and beauty still exist, in the form of two teenagers who will have to take upon themselves the bur- den of rebuilding - on the foundation of love - a world that seems lost without hope: the camera follows their journey in a sinuous and rigorous way and has the task of telling their loneliness within an almost constantly hostile nature.

CHARACTERS

To me, the young protagonists of this movie, the Son and Maria, are a re-iteration of Adam and Eve, they are heirs to a world that no longer exists, and the forefathers of the world they will build. The most delicate choice in the preparation phase was precisely the casting of these young individuals, whose fac- es had to exude the ambivalent purity and violence of their age. Around these two young actors - who given their age were almost amateurs - I built a solid and talented cast as in previous films: the Father and the Executioner, the Witch or the disturbing twins Lorenzo and Matteo are modern players of a sto- ry that I want to take on as a challenge to the static nature of that kind of cinema that today no longer knows how to amaze and move our only judge, the .

Claudio Cupellini

CLAUDIO CUPELLINI Claudio Cupellini , director and screenwriter, was born in Padua in 1973. In 2010 his second film Una vita tranquilla (A Quiet Life), starring Toni Servillo, Marco D'Amore and Francesco Di Leva, was presented at Rome Film Festival and gained Toni Servillo the Award for Best Actor. In 2015 with Alaska, starring and Àstrid Bergès- Frisbey , Cupellini competed in Rome Intl. Film Festival for the second time. Cupellini is also one of the directors of the acclaimed tv-series Gomorrah

2015 THE BEGINNERS (ALASKA)

2010 A QUIET LIFE (UNA VITA TRANQUILLA)

2007 LESSONS IN CHOCOLATE (LEZIONI DI CIOCCOLATO)

Gipi LA TERRA DEI FIGLI THE GRAPHIC NOVEL One of the most important and exciting comics by Gipi is back in a new format, a deluxe hardcover volume. A post-apocalyptic story that lets us think about our present, and inspired the homonymous film by Claudio Cupellini.

“Whole chapters in history books could have been written about the causes and reasons that led to the end. But after the end, no more books were written”

An unknown future. The end of civilization has come, we don't know how it happened. There’s flies in the air, and the water is poisoned. A father and his two teenage sons are among the few survivors. They live in a shack by a lake, and there’s no longer a society, only the struggle for survival. Men are divided into predators and prey, any encounter with others is dangerous. Eve- ry night, the father writes something inside a notebook, and his children would like to learn to read, to know how was life before "The End": but the man doesn’t want them to...

Gipi’s post-apocalyptic graphic novel: one of his most loved books, a narrative challenge that starts out abandoning colors, captions, voiceovers. Only dialogues and silences, time passing without any ellipsis, to telling a black and white story that goes straight to the heart. In these future desolate landscapes, Gipi once again talks to us, about us. About fathers and sons, men and women. On the mystery of human nature, so inexplicably capable of love and hate, of greed and generosity, of beauty and ferocity. Once the masks of civilization have disappeared, what remains is the pressing and compelling story of two young children seeking their place in the new world they now face. A translated in 17 languages and winner of prestigious awards, including the Bos- carato Award at the Treviso Comic Book Festival, the Prix Utopiales BD of Nantes, the Readers' Award of the Saint Malo Festival, the Grand Prix RTL de la banda dessinée and the ACBD Award from the critics and journalists association of French comics.

Gipi (Gian-Alfonso Pacinotti) was born in Pisa in 1963, and lives in Rome. After the award- winning debut in 2003 with Esterno notte, his graphic and narrative talent was established within a few years, obtaining with his books great acclaim from the audience and numerous in- ternational awards, like the "René Goscinny" award and the "Fauve d'Or ” for Appunti Per Una Storia di Guerra as Best Screenplay and Best Book at the Angoulême Festival. In 2014, his Unas- toria was the first comic book to enter the twelve finalists of the Premio Strega. La Terra dei Figli, from 2016, was published and translated all over the world, winning the most prestigious awards and inspiring the homonymous film directed by Claudio Cupellini. Gipi has created and produced independent videos for the web and TV. He directed the movie L’Ultimo Terrestre, presented in competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, and Il Ragazzo Più Fe- lice del Mondo, which premiered in Venice in 2018. Always passionate about games, he con- ceived and designed Bruti, a medieval- style card game. In 2020 he wrote the story Aldobrando, designed by Luigi Critone. His latest book is Momenti straordinari con applausi finti.